Let’s think about reactions. Think about how people respond to things that don’t go their way. You learn a lot about maturity, which is a lot about emotional command. Years ago my stepdad told me he feels bad for people who are angry — anger is an ugly display, a senseless expression, the avenue of the underdeveloped. It took me a while to know what he meant. The thing about anger is how satisfying it feels in the moment. When provoked, it’s almost a craving. The thing about maturity is remembering the other moments.

Wednesday night, Sean Rodriguez’s anger was provoked. One of the enduring images from the wild-card game is Rodriguez beating the life out of a lifeless orange cooler, an act that’s previously sent Rodriguez to the hospital. To Rodriguez’s credit, he didn’t do that to another living person, not that he didn’t try. He was tossed out for throwing a punch; he subsequently threw several more. Rodriguez needed to let his anger out, the pressure having mounted, and the release was violent, paroxysmic. Rodriguez thought of nothing other than resolution through his fists.

Wednesday night, at nearly the exact same time, Jake Arrieta’s anger was provoked. That which provoked Arrieta provoked Arrieta’s teammates, and it was Arrieta’s teammates who provoked Sean Rodriguez. Unlike Rodriguez, Arrieta remained an active player in the game. And very much unlike Rodriguez, Arrieta channeled his anger into something non-violent and constructive. The night saw Arrieta demonstrate his superiority in more than one way.

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It’s tough to get an athlete to say much of substance in a postgame press conference. Without the benefit of a personal, one-on-one setting, and without much time for the player to gather his thoughts and reflect on his personal performance, more often than not a reporter simply could pick the cliché responses they’re most likely to hear out of a hat and arrive at a close approximation of the real thing. I’ve found this to be especially true of a starting pitcher who’s just suffered a loss.

“[Insert pitcher name here], what was giving you trouble tonight?”

“Mostly fastball command. Just wasn’t locating my fastball.”

It’s a boring answer, one that a beat writer hears something like 100 times over the course of a typical season, but it’s also an answer with which it’s usually hard to argue after a starting pitcher struggles through a start. If you really had to boil down the art and science of pitching to a one, most important thing, you might pick fastball command. Pitchers throw their fastball more than any other pitch, by far, and without fastball command, a pitcher will almost always end his night with a high number in the walks or hits column of the box score.

If there’s something you know about Gerrit Cole, it’s that he’s one of the very best pitchers in baseball, largely because he has an amazing fastball. By average velocity, it’s the third-hardest heater in the league. By PITCHf/x run values, it was the second-most valuable fastball in the league. Cole complements that fastball with a great slider and a good changeup, but he largely lives, and subsequently dies, by the fastball.

In Wednesday’s 4-0 Wild Card loss to the Cubs, it was the latter.

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When you see Jake Arrieta’s final line – 9 innings, 4 hits, 0 runs, 0 walks, 11 strikeouts — it’s actually kind of hard to believe, but as dominating as the Cubs ace was on Wednesday night, the Pirates actually had a chance to beat him. Arrieta was amazing, but he wasn’t quite perfect, and in the sixth inning, the Pirates put together a legitimate rally.

The inning started with pinch-hitter Travis Snider driving a hard grounder up the middle for a leadoff single. Gregory Polanco smoked a line drive right at third baseman Kris Bryant, but Bryant’s circus act catch meant that it simply turned into out number one, but then Arrieta gave the Pirates a gift by hitting Josh Harrison with a curveball, putting a runner in scoring position for the first time all night. And then Andrew McCutchen hit a laser to shortstop that Addison Russell couldn’t handle, allowing everyone to advance safely, which loaded the bases and brought the tying run to the plate.

Down 4-0, having only had two baserunners prior to the inning, a Pirates team that looked unable to put anything together against Arrieta suddenly was one swing away from tying up the game. Starling Marte, the team’s cleanup hitter, stepped to the plate. While not a traditional slugger, Marte hit 19 home runs this year and is capable of driving the ball, especially if he can sit on a fastball.

Marte is somewhat of the cliche of a raw baseball player; he crushes fastballs and struggles with soft stuff that moves. For his career, he’s hit .313 with a .521 slugging percentage against four-seam fastballs, and .294 with a .423 slugging percentage against two-seam fastballs. For comparison, he’s hit .198 against curves and .260 against breaking balls, with less power than he produces on fastballs. Marte is, essentially, a fastball hitter.

So unsurprisingly, Arrieta started him with a slider, but he missed his spot and bounced the ball in the dirt, allowing Marte to easily take ball one. With the bases loaded, Arrieta decided to challenge Marte, and gave him the fastball he was certainly looking for. And Marte crushed it.

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It’s always an oversimplification to reduce a baseball game to the starting pitchers, but reduce we do anyway. In our defense, the starting pitchers are always the most important players in any given individual game, so it’s not like this comes out of nowhere. But you can see this taking place with tonight’s NL wild-card game. It’s a game between two excellent baseball teams, two teams who deserve to play in full playoff series, but to a lot of people, the whole story is Jake Arrieta. To others, it’s both Arrieta and Gerrit Cole. Everyone understands there will also be hitters, but the game might as well be a pitch-off.

Almost literally anything can happen, but my read of the consensus is that the Cubs have the edge and Cole will need to match Arrieta’s zeroes. With that in mind, this seems like a game likely to be decided by a very narrow margin. With that in mind, any sort of advantage could end up being a hugely significant advantage. You know what could constitute an advantage? Knowing what the other guy is going to throw. I can’t speak to every pitch, but both Arrieta and Cole do at least have their tells.

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Individual performances tend to be magnified in the postseason, and that is especially true of pitchers. While 16-18 other players appear in the lineups and many others will have profound impacts on the outcomes of games over the next month, the starting pitcher will likely have more influence over the outcome of a single game than any other player. Everything is magnified in the playoffs from managerial decisions to clutch hits, errors, and great plays in the field, but starting pitching is perhaps most deserving of the increased scrutiny. By the end of the second inning, perhaps sometime into the third, the starting pitcher will have taken part in more plays than any position player during the entire game.

In a winner-take-all game like the Wild Card, deserving players might be pushed to the background ahead of the game in favor of the pitching, but the matchup between pitchers will likely be the difference between the team that keeps playing and the team whose season is over. For those watching the Cubs take on the Pirates, they will witness one of the very best pitching matchups the playoffs have ever seen.

In Jake Arrieta and Gerrit Cole, both teams will feature bona fide aces. Arrieta might have just had the best half-season of all time. Overall, he’s pitched 229 innings with an ERA of 1.77 and a FIP of 2.35, giving Arrieta a 45 ERA- and a 60 FIP- over the full season after league and park are taken into account. He’s in pretty rare company. Consider: since the end of World War II, these are the qualified pitchers with an ERA- below 50 and a FIP- below 65 over a full season.

Greatest Combination of FIP and ERA in History

Name	Season	Team	IP	ERA	FIP	WAR	ERA-	FIP-
Pedro Martinez	1999	Red Sox	213.1	2.07	1.39	11.6	42	31
Roger Clemens	1997	Blue Jays	264	2.05	2.25	10.7	45	50
Pedro Martinez	2000	Red Sox	217	1.74	2.17	9.4	35	48
Ron Guidry	1978	Yankees	273.2	1.74	2.19	9.1	47	58
Dwight Gooden	1985	Mets	276.2	1.53	2.13	8.9	44	58
Bob Gibson	1968	Cardinals	304.2	1.12	1.75	8.6	38	64
Zack Greinke	2009	Royals	229.1	2.16	2.33	8.6	48	54
Pedro Martinez	1997	Expos	241.1	1.9	2.39	8.5	45	57
Roger Clemens	1990	Red Sox	228.1	1.93	2.18	8.2	47	55
Greg Maddux	1995	Braves	209.2	1.63	2.26	7.9	39	52
Greg Maddux	1994	Braves	202	1.56	2.39	7.4	37	54
Pedro Martinez	2003	Red Sox	186.2	2.22	2.21	7.4	48	51
Jake Arrieta	2015	Cubs	229	1.77	2.35	7.3	45	60
Pedro Martinez	2002	Red Sox	199.1	2.26	2.24	7.3	50	54
Randy Johnson	1997	Mariners	213	2.28	2.82	7	50	62

The only pitcher with better context neutral numbers in both ERA and FIP and more innings was Dwight Gooden in his amazing 1985 season. It is easy to see why so much attention has been given to Jake Arrieta this season and in this matchup, but the Pittsburgh Pirates’s Gerrit Cole has had an excellent season of his own. Cole’s 5.4 WAR is fifth in the National and ninth in Major League Baseball. Pitchers don’t choose their opposition, leaving great matchups more to a question of chance than a complete reflection of their own skill, but the high level of both players heading into this game is something rarely seen in a game of this magnitude.

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To think, there used to be real conversations about whether the Cubs should start Jon Lester or Jake Arrieta in a potential Wild Card Game. I don’t want to shortchange Lester, who’s a terrific pitcher in his own right — one of the better pitchers in the National League. But Arrieta is just on one of those runs. If you want to play along and say something stupid like “Arrieta’s on a run that he’s earned,” then that would be exactly three fewer earned runs than Arrieta has allowed since the beginning of August. Roll your eyes all you want, but don’t pretend like that sentence wasn’t effective.

There’s a certain detectable sense of dread. The Pirates and Cubs are guaranteed a one-game playoff to determine who advances to the NLDS. The only question is where it’ll be played, but the odds-on favorite at the moment is Pittsburgh. People have complaints about the one-game-playoff format. Some of them are legitimate, even given that playoff series don’t do much better to crown the deserving ballclub. But this is what we have, and it’s exciting, and it just means the Pirates get the misfortune of facing Arrieta with everything on the line. He’s an opponent who feels unbeatable. I don’t want to take anything away from Gerrit Cole, but it feels like it’s lopsided. There’s no one in the game pitching better than Arrieta has.

Arrieta just faced the Pirates, in Chicago. He got himself pretty deep into a perfect game. A week and a half earlier against the Pirates, Arrieta gave up two runs (one earned) in eight innings. In early August, he blanked the Pirates over seven frames. In the middle of May, he gave up one run in seven innings. Toward the end of April, another one-run, seven-inning outing. It’s not like the Pirates haven’t had chances. Arrieta has just been that dominant. The Cubs have lost just one of his past 17 starts; in that game, they got no-hit. Arrieta is officially an adversary you worry about.

The attention is on the Pirates. It’s on how they intend to win this seemingly unwinnable game. Buster Olney just talked to some people in the industry about what the Pirates are supposed to do. The general message is that the Pirates are up against it. There’s nothing as psychologically daunting as an ace, and Pirates fans can just think back to last October’s one-game playoff, against Madison Bumgarner. He never seemed to even give them an opportunity to advance. It’s true: Arrieta could well take over the game. He could literally win it on his own, like he did the other day, with seven shutout innings and a homer. But history, at least, isn’t quite so pessimistic. The Pirates’ odds aren’t as long as they seem.

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Gerrit Cole might not be the best player on the Pittsburgh Pirates — Andrew McCutchen probably still holds that distinction — but over the course of the next 10 days, perhaps no pitcher in the National League, or perhaps in Major League Baseball, will have a greater impact on his team’s season. Cole has slid under the radar of the Cy Young race as Clayton Kershaw, Jake Arrieta, and Zack Greinke are all having historically good seasons. While Cole is a bit behind that NL pitching triumvirate, his 2.60 FIP is third in MLB behind only Kershaw and Arrieta. His nearly identical 2.61 ERA is sixth, behind the above three, as well as Dallas Keuchel and David Price. Cole has already pitched some important games down the stretch this season, but how he pitches in the near future could frame how many people view the Pirates’ season as they head to the playoffs for the third straight year.

Cole has pitched very well as the regular season comes to a close. Over his last four starts, he has faced only playoff teams in the Chicago Cubs (twice), the St. Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Pirates have won all four of Cole’s starts, during which time he’s recorded a 32:5 strikeout-to-walk ratio and allowed just one home run over 27.1 innings, good for a 2.30 ERA and 1.94 FIP. The starts against division rival were of particular importance. One September 6, the Pirates trailed the Cardinals by 6.5 games. A loss at that time would have put the team 7.5 games back, making their shot at a divisional comeback almost impossible. The win also kept the Pirates three games ahead of the Cubs. His next start, against those same Cubs, lengthened the lead for home-field advantage to five games and briefly put them within two games of the Cardinals.

Cole just recently turned 25 years old, and in his age-24 season, he has been one of the best in recent history at his age. Among qualified pitchers 24 and under, Cole’s 5.5 WAR is the best such figure, a full two wins better than Carlos Martinez’s mark. Since 2010, the only pitchers 24 and under with a season exceeding Cole’s current 5.5 fWAR are Clayton Kershaw (twice), Matt Harvey and Felix Hernandez.

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Toward the end of April, things weren’t looking so hot for Pirates relief ace Mark Melancon. His velocity was down — way down — and Pirates manager Clint Hurdle was beginning to field questions about Melancon’s job security. Fast forward to September, and it seems like ages ago that we were even discussing this in a serious matter, because Melancon is on the verge of a historic season.

It would have been hard to claim that Melancon would go on to have such a great season back in April. Hurdle’s proclamation that Melancon would remain the closer was met with derision. The Bullpen Report guys moved Melancon and the Pirates closer situation into the red for the first time on April 22. The velocity on his cutter, which in the past had averaged 92 mph or faster, was averaging 88 mph. In the days immediately after April 22, his velocity would dip into the 87 mph range. Hardly big league worthy. At the same time, Arquimedes Caminero was making a name for himself, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the guy who might just be the right-handed Aroldis Chapman would take over as the Pirates closer. Or if not him, then perhaps the dependable Tony Watson. Or maybe Jared Hughes. Either way, it looked like Melancon’s days were numbered.
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Injuries are an unfortunate part of most physical activities, and Major League Baseball is no exception. Players tear hamstrings running, their ACLs changing directions, and hurt their shoulders and elbows throwing. To the extent possible, those involved in the game do their very best to prevent injuries. Trainers and teams go to great lengths to strengthen and stretch out players so as many injuries as possible can be prevented. Innings and pitches are monitored to try to keep pitchers healthy.

Often, we might feel like throwing our arms up in the air and declare that prevention is impossible, but teams generally try to keep their players healthy. Whether the incentive is to achieve a greater moral good or keep valuable employees productive is debatable, but whenever an injury occurs that might be prevented, it draws attention. The attention does not focus entirely on the actual injury suffered, but whether it is possible to prevent similar future injuries. Chris Coghlan’s slide on a double play — a slide which resulted in a season-ending injury to Jung-ho Kang — is an example of the type of play and injury that spurs debate.

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It’s mostly a matter of aesthetics. A little bit of pride, but, for the most part, an out is an out, if you did nothing wrong. Batters make outs most of the time, especially if the batter’s name is Trevor Cahill. The Cubs, presumably, aren’t bothered that Cahill made an out in the fifth inning on Tuesday. They would’ve expected as much, and if anything, they’d be happy about his hitting a line drive. But ultimately, Cahill was thrown out by Gregory Polanco, and he was thrown out at first base, despite his quality contact. Maybe even in part because of his quality contact. Cahill found himself the victim of a 9-3 putout, and though Cahill didn’t make any mistakes, it’s naturally the sort of play that generates attention. It can’t not be dwelt on.

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